This Election Is Really About Whether The Republican Party Can Survive America's Demographic Changes

Kasha Nelson, 31, was only supposed to go hiking with a friend.
But in the 45 minutes it took to drive from Taos to Ski Valley in
northern New Mexico she'd changed her vote. For the last three
elections she's voted Democrat, but this time she was leaning
towards Romney.

"In 2008 I got caught up in the whole hope and change thing, but
I've lost total confidence in Obama's ability to get us out of
this mess and I thought, with his business background, Romney
might be a different breed of politician."

She shared her intentions with her friend, a woman in her 20s and
in a long-term relationship, who promptly reminded Kasha that she
had just had an abortion. Romney's election, and the supreme
court nominations that come with it, her friend argued, could
take away that choice and criminalise that action. Is that what
Kasha wanted? Kasha, who was raised "very" Catholic in a trailer
in southern Alabama, believes abortion is a necessary evil. She
finds the Republicans' social conservatism a "real turn-off" but
"has a lot of faith in the independence of the supreme court".

Until then, Kasha had become weary of the way all conversations
about the election with her friends would start with discussions
about making ends meet and then switch to abortion, contraception
and gay marriage as soon as she mentioned she might vote for
Romney.

She was beginning to feel like her life was stalling and was
looking for a leader who could revitalise the economy. Once a
bilingual teacher, she took a career break to do a creative
writing course in Santa Fe, and was now struggling to get back
into the job market. After we finished breakfast she was driving
five hours to Denver to take up an office job paying $6,000 less
than the teaching job she'd left a few years ago.

But when confronted with the direct experience of her friend and
the direct consequence of her vote, she felt compelled to
reconsider. "I went back and looked up where Romney stood on the
issues on his website and I just decided I couldn't vote for
that. My vote couldn't just be about money and jobs."

There are (to adopt Romney's phrase) "binders full of women" who
are turned off by the Republicans' policies on reproductive
rights. But those binders become even thicker when marital status
is taken into account.
A summer poll gave Obama a 46-point lead among single women
like Kasha and her friend. And almost every year there are more
of them. Thanks to feminism and the increased educational
opportunities, equality laws and reproductive choices that have
come with it, women are getting
married and
having children later in life. In 1970, unmarried women
comprised 38% of the population; today they are 47%. Kasha's
mother got married when she was 19 and had Kasha shortly
afterwards. Kasha has other options. She'd like to keep them.

It's just one of the examples of the many ways in which Americans
live, love, move and behave that is having an impact on the
nation's electoral landscape. The US is becoming less white, less
religious, more urban and diverse in its living arrangements, and
migrating to the south and west. Some of these changes, like the
growing strength of the Latino vote or an ageing population
heading for the sun belt, are demographic.

Last year, for the first time ever,
the majority of babies born in America were not white,
presaging a near future where white people will be a minority.
Others, like the propensity of people to marry later and for
women to remain single longer, are social. Some of these changes
are happening very quickly:
the proportion of children born out of wedlock from 2006-2010
was double that born in 2002. Others take more time: during that
same time span the median age at which American women married
increased by less than a year. Many are not immediately obvious.
The fastest growing "religious group" in the US is those with "no
religious affiliation". In 1944 they were one in 20; in 2004 they
were one in seven; by 2024 they are projected to be at least one
in five. But all have political consequences. America is changing
far faster and more thoroughly than its electoral rhetoric,
strategies and alliances can keep up.

"The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting,"
argues Ruy Teixeira in a 2010 paper Democratic Change and the
Future of the Parties for the liberal thinktank, the Center for
American Progress. "A powerful concatenation of demographic
forces is transforming the American electorate and reshaping both
major political parties. And, as demographic trends continue,
this transformation and reshaping will deepen."

'Latinos became more moderate'

In few places is this clearer than
New Mexico, which has gone from the swingiest of states to
being safely Democratic in just three election cycles. In 2000,
the outcome in New Mexico was closer than Florida: Al Gore took it with a majority of just 366. In
2004 the Republicans won it back with a slightly healthier 5,988
lead. Then in 2008 there was a rout. Obama reclaimed it with a
15-point margin and a lead of 125,590. This year it is not even
being contested. The last four polls there have Obama leading by
double figures.

The most obvious explanation for this would be the rising number
of Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010 the state's Latino population
grew 24.6%. Between 2000 and 2008 the number of registered Latino
voters leaped by 44% and the number of actual Latino voters
jumped by 51%. At just over a third New Mexico has the highest
proportion of Latino voters of any state in the country.

But that explanation, on its own, would be incomplete and
incorrect. The number of Hispanics were growing in 2000 and 2004,
yet the Republicans won the state back and increased their share
of the Latino vote. The numbers continued growing and the state
still elected a Republican governor (Susana Martinez, who is Latina) in 2010.
So there is nothing inherent about a growing Latino population
that makes a Democratic outcome inevitable. True, Latinos tend to
be poorer and poor people tend to vote Democrat.
But Latinos are also more likely to be religious and against
abortion than the nation at large too. Republicans have the only
two Latino governors in the country – Martinez and Brian Sandoval in Nevada. After this election
cycle they will have more Latino senators than Democrats. Of the
five states with the highest proportion of Latinos two,
California and New Mexico, are safely Democratic. Two, Arizona
and Texas are, for now, safely Republican, and one, Nevada, is a
swing state.

So demography is not electoral destiny. People vote their
interests not their identities and parties mould their platforms
to appeal to people's interests. There is nothing inevitable
about either. Women are evenly split on the issue of abortion;
polls showed Catholics more likely to demand employers
provide healthcare plans that cover birth control at no cost than
Protestants. Until the 1980 Republicans were more likely to be
pro-choice than Democrats. The complicating factor is that quite
often those interests are intertwined with their sense of
identity. Wealthy African Americans overwhelmingly vote for
Democrats not because they will be better off financially, but
because they are turned off by the Republicans' racially charged
rhetoric.

"A decade ago there would have been a large number of Latinos who
saw themselves as conservative. But they became more moderate as
the Republicans moved to the right," says Gabriel Sanchez, a
professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The
decline has been quite dramatic.
In 2004 Bush got 44% of the Latino vote; in 2008 McCain
netted just 30%; a poll released
earlier this week by Latino Decisions suggest just 24% will
vote for Romney.

The reason New Mexico has turned Democrat isn't just because it
became more Latino but because Republicans simultaneously became
perceived as more xenophobic. "Republicans have really leveraged
the anti-immigrant rhetoric to appeal to their white nativist
base, and in the short term that might work nationally," explains
Sanchez, who also acts as the director of research for the
polling organisation Latino Decisions. "But in the long term it
will have negative effects. They are seen not as anti-immigrant
but anti-Latino."

'This election is a critical juncture for the Republican party'

California is used as the cautionary tale. Between 1952 and 1988
it voted Republican every time bar one. In 1992 Clinton won it
with 46% of the vote but it still had the potential to swing
back. In 1994 came Proposition 187, a Republican-backed measure
to bar undocumented migrants from healthcare, public education
and other services in the state. They won the vote (though the
law was found unconstitutional) and lost Latinos. Now, like New
Mexico, it's safely Democratic. "Research show that Latinos who
came of voting age during that time are less likely to ever vote
Republican again because that is when their image of Republicans
was formed. Latinos are not in the bag for Republicans yet. But
it could get that way if Republicans don't change." If it did,
Texas and Arizona would, sooner or later, go the way of New
Mexico and California.

This is not just a problem locally, but with the entire
Republican electoral strategy since the end of the civil rights
era – the last time in fact that there was a seismic shift in the
nation's electoral allegiances. Back then Republicans realised
that if they could shed their reputation as the party of Lincoln
they could peel off a whites in both the south and northern
suburbs with a subtle appeal to racial animus. It worked.
In 1976, Jimmy
Carter won all the former confederate states bar Virginia. By
2000, Al Gore won none, even though he and his father had
represented one of them (Tennessee) as senators.

Richard Nixon explained the plan to his chief-of-staff, Bob
Haldeman, who wrote it in his diary. "You have to face the fact
that the whole problem is really the blacks," Nixon told him.
"The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not
appearing to."

When white people made up around 85% of the voters that made
sense. But over the past three election cycles alone the white vote has
dropped from 80% in 2000 to 74% in 2008. With 50,000 new
Latinos becoming eligible to vote every month, the long-term
trend for that white share of the vote will be downward, which
means the more black and Latino voters the Republicans alienate,
the more white voters they need to replace them. "The
demographics race we're losing badly," said Republican, senator
Lindsey Graham, acknowledging the problem. "We're not generating
enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

They are trying their best. Romney has a 20-point lead among
whites – the biggest racial gap for almost 30 years. Meanwhile,
Joe the Plumber, now a Republican congressional candidate in
Ohio, has an original plan for immigration reform. "Put a fence
on the damn border and start shooting," he says.

But sooner rather than later Republicans will either become more
inclusive or less viable. "This is the last time anyone will try
to do this," one Republican strategist told the National Journal.
And Republican consultant Ana Navarro told the Los Angeles Times:
"Where his [Romney's] numbers are right now, we should be
pressing the panic button."

For in an increasingly polarised electorate loyal constituencies
make a big difference. In
swing states like Nevada, Florida, Virginia and North
Carolina, white people comprise less than two-thirds of the
population. In Colorado, Latinos make up 20%. Even in states like
Ohio, Wisconsin or Iowa, where Latinos make up between 3% and 5%
of the population, they can make a difference in a close-run
contest.

"This election is a critical juncture for the Republican party,"
says Christine Sierra, heads UNM's Southwest Hispanic Research
Institute. "Latinos would be a more diverse voting bloc if there
were reasons to vote Republican. But without those reasons its
possible they could become as cohesive a voting bloc as African
Americans."

Republicans' stance on reproductive rights, like their southern
strategy on race, was engineered during the early 1970s with
electoral advantage in mind. In 1969 George Bush Sr, then a Texas
congressman, told the House: "We need to make family planning a
household word. We need to take the sensationalism out of the
topic so it can no longer be used by militants … who are using it
as a political stepping stone." That same year Nixon said: "No
American woman should be denied access to family planning
assistance because of her economic condition." But a couple of
years later,
as Jill Lepore points out in a New Yorker article, Patrick
Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon advocating using the abortion
issue to woo the Catholic vote. "If the president should publicly
take his stand against abortion as offensive to his own moral
principles … then we can force [Ed] Muskie [a failed Democratic
presidential candidate in 1972] to make the choice between his
tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends."
The next week Nixon spoke of his "personal belief in the sanctity
of human life – including the life of the yet unborn".

This has served them better among evangelicals than Catholics,
but it is causing considerable damage to their reputation among
the growing number of educated women and unmarried couples.

"I just think Republicans want to take us backwards to another
time," says Erica, 37, a school teacher who lives in Taos, New
Mexico, where she raises her child alone. "When they're talking
about family values I don't think they're talking about a single
mum who's juggling child care and work. I don't think they can
related to a single woman in her thirties with some life
experience. When you go to Planned Parenthood they don't offer
you an abortion as soon as you walk through the door. They talk
through your options."

"They just seem so tunnel-visioned," says Erica, who was raised
evangelical in Minnesota. The episode when Rush Limbaugh referred to Georgetown student
Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" after Fluke spoke in
support of mandating insurance coverage for contraception, she
says, is a case in point. "That suggests a larger attitude
towards women. I don't know if Romney agrees but a large segment
of his party does and he didn't come out and say that's crazy."

Some progressives believe these trends spell the death knell for
the Republican party in its present form. "The Democratic party
will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies
that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory," argues
Teixeira, author of
The Emerging Democratic Majority. "While the Republican party
will be forced to move toward the centre to compete for these
constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to
lose its dominant place in the GOP."

That's too deterministic. For a start there are countervailing
trends. The migration of Americans south and west over the years
and
the reapportioning of electoral college seats to accommodate
those population movements has helped Republicans. If Obama won
the same states this year as he did four years ago he would have
six electoral college seats less because the population in the
states he won has not risen as fast as in the states he lost.
Demography alone over the last decade has handed Republicans the
equivalent of Iowa.

Moreover, most of the groups Republicans are losing are less
motivated than those they have gained. Only 71% of Latinos, 76%
of the unmarried and 78% of the non religious
say they will definitely vote. Conversely 86% of whites, 87%
of Protestants and 88% of married people say they will. This is
why there is such a discrepancy between how Obama fares with
registered voters compared to likely voters and why the 'ground
game' will in the coming weeks will be so crucial. For all the
emphasis on women voters Obama is tied with women likely voters
overall and trails white women by 9 points.

For the Democrats to take advantage of these changes they have to
give people something to vote for and then get them to vote.
That's not necessarily as easy as it sounds.

Still unable to bring herself to vote for Obama, Kasha cast her
ballot early for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. "I'm totally
disgusted with the two-party system," she says. "We don't have a
good choice, and I don't want to want to compromise. I don't care
if the guy I vote for doesn't get to win. I've had enough of just
voting out of fear for the other side."